Nick Gillespie
speaker
229 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Nick Gillespie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But in any case, I was going to say that I, you know, I'm a libertarian because I grew up lower middle class, not because it's often characterized as, you know, this is, you know, this is a philosophy for upper middle class people, highly educated people, men mostly, and some women who are like Ayn Rand or something like, you know, use cigarette holders or something.
Yeah, that's right. You know, my whole point, I agree with you in the questions you're asking. I think capitalism, broadly speaking, as an operating system generates more possibilities for people. I agree. And this is why I'm not an anarchist. You know, when you talk about poor people.
Yeah, well, part of the problem with political discourse in America, and I think it's always been this way, is that 90% of us say we're middle class. And so you get middle class people, and this happened under, it happened under George W. Bush, it happened under Trump, certainly under Biden, where suddenly households who are making $400,000-
are being subsidized by the government and you hear this you know i'm talking to you from hell's kitchen in new york and you'll hear people in new york say with a straight face like oh you know making 300 grand in new york just isn't really a lot it's just not happening right yeah you know it's like you know we're pinched and it's like then move or you know whatever but what i was going to say is that the libertarian argument for helping people
who need it. And assistance in the market goes something like this. Or part of it is that, you know, if you're a kid and your parents, for whatever reason, aren't, you know, they're not well off, you don't have a lot of options, giving kids access to education and to healthcare will allow them to grow so that they can fully participate in society, which is a good thing.
Then we can say, okay, well, that's why we have, you know, Medicaid and why we have public schools. And then it might be the case that we say, well, you know what, let's maybe give the parents money so that they can pick the school their kid goes to. Like the government doesn't have to run the schools, et cetera.
But there should be some aid and assistance in the interest of helping people fully participate in society.
I think I can make a case that is consistent with libertarian beliefs and a belief in mostly free markets and laissez-faire and certainly personal liberties, that the state can exist to help people in terms of safety nets and in terms of helping to guarantee or at least multiply opportunities.
But having said that, the reason why cars became cheaper and better and isn't because the government said, hey, you know what, we're going to give you
uh you know a subsidized loan in order to to buy that gremlin you know it actually cars in america got better uh and cheaper when you think about it in terms of the amount of work that people have to do to buy them when we opened up to competition and throughout the you know through the mid 70s
uh car markets in america were basically you know it's very hard to get imports um and as a result we got you know the cars that you and i grew up uh driving you know the one good thing is you know i think about this all the time and again this is a question of progress that we should not celebrate uncritically but take note of um i can remember people would have parties on the street if their car made it to a hundred thousand miles and the odometer went to zero sure
There were like two or three in your lifetime. Yeah. And now you don't even change the spark plugs on a new car until 100,000 miles. And it is true that business owners want to, they want you to work for as little as they have to pay you. But then if you're a good worker, you're going to be competing. Other companies are going to be like, you know what?
This guy is actually pretty good at what he's doing. I'm going to woo him away with a better wage.
Yeah, no. Well, I also think it's kind of, you know, you can push it too far. I was looking in anticipation for this. I was looking at the percentage of households and whatnot that are on SNAP benefits. And things happen. Like, I think almost everybody in America, regardless of political persuasion or ideology or anything, would say, you know what? Like, we don't want people to starve.
Yeah. No, it drives me nuts. And this is, again, from a libertarian point of view, I think you can say, okay, we're going to have certain social welfare safety net programs. Those are important. But then when you start getting to like, well, okay, people who are making three times the poverty line or something are still getting a benefit.
maybe that's not a great use of taxpayer money because that money's coming from somewhere else. But also, you know, and you find this in all sorts of giveaways under COVID and whatnot where people just, you know, okay, well, you know, why do seniors get prescription drug benefits, you know, regardless of how much money they make or why are they getting them anyway if
if they don't actually need them.
It's two things. One is, I would say it would be better to give people like, you know, we know people are poor because they're below the poverty line. Like give them cash, you know, just give them cash and say, okay, here, we trust you not to buy, you know, not simply to buy a Letio cereal for your kid. Right.
Absolutely.
Yeah. And it's like, well, they'll figure out how to do that anyway. But to get to this point, because you mentioned Jeff Bezos, who just recently said he wants the opinion section of The Washington Post to focus on supporting personal liberties and free markets. And it's true, like when government gives a benefit and then says, oh, but you know what?
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